Manchester City Football Club & Asahi Launch NFT Collection

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Introduction

👋 Welcome back to another edition of Sporting Crypto!Bitcoin has hit an all-time high, as ETFs in the US continue to push price discovery into realms we’ve not seen before. And yet, apart from Visa’s Web3 Loyalty solution announced at the start of the year, the rest of Q1 has seen enterprise brands largely sit on the sidelines.

I expect this to change in Q2 and especially H2 of 2024. Brands across every industry are still working on what Web3 means to them.

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It’s been a while since Sporting Crypto has covered a sports team NFT drop, and that’s mostly because there haven’t been that many.

In this edition, we cover the launch of the Manchester City Football Club x Asahi’s NFT collection.Discussed:

🍻Asahi x Manchester City Digital Collectibles🤝 Sponsors in Web3 and Sport🤔What is the best way to approach NFTs as a Sports team?🧠Concluding Thoughts & Analysis

🍻Asahi x Manchester City Digital Collectibles

In November 2023, Manchester City and Asahi Super Dry announced ‘Brewed for Treble Success’ an NFT collection depicting the most iconic and memorable moments from the 2022/23 season for the football club. The launch of the NFTs was not until the 7th of March 2024.

There are four pieces: Derby Day Domination, Undefeated, A Giant Step Towards the Title, and Trophy Parade. The collection consists of 84 editions, commemorating the number of points Manchester City won from their 28 wins in the 2022/23 Premier League season.

The NFTs were priced at 0.032 ETH each (~$125 at current prices) and the collection is owned by 53 different wallets giving it 63% unique ownership.

The collection was launched via leading NFT marketplace OpenSea on the 7th of March 2024. 

🤝 Sponsors in Web3 & Sports

At the start of the 2023/24 season, Manchester City expanded their partnership with Asahi, with the non-alcoholic Super Dry 0% beer becoming the club’s official training kit partner.

The significance of sponsors when it comes to Web3 activities cannot be understated. Whether it’s a brand sponsor or a blockchain underwriting the costs of these campaigns, they’re vital — because sports teams and leagues are reticent to spend their own cash on an area of innovation that may not yield immediate, direct revenue.

In a piece I penned a few weeks ago when discussing the Mastercard x UEFA Champions League NFT Trivia Game, I wrote: 

Many sports teams and leagues will eventually self-fund their Web3 activities, but for now, sponsors are key to making the business side of the equation is solved.

🤔What is the best way to approach NFTs as a Sports team?

NFTs in 2021 were a huge bubble and one that many brands globally participated in.

Some were trying to simply extract value from an ecosystem they viewed to have deep pockets. Others were consistent in their thinking that this was a long-term way to acquire new customers and engage current ones in a digitally native, frictionless way.

One thing this bubble did show is that most sports fanbases don’t want to buy NFTs, which is why we’ve seen some of the biggest success stories in the intersection of Web3 & sport focus on free digital collectibles.

One thing to note is that this Manchester City x Asahi collection has a supply of 84 NFTs, which is far, far smaller than what we are used to as an industry — but also a far cry from what we’ve seen other brands launch in the past. When Pepsi launched ‘Pepsi Mic Drop’ in December 2021, there was 1,862 NFTs. Budweiser as a brand, have launched almost 12,000 NFTs into the market according to their profile on OpenSea. When you get to numbers of that supply, there can be significant revenue driven by NFT drops if they sell out.

An important thing that I’ve been writing about is how you move beyond one-off drops and create something more sustainable.

How do digital collectibles go beyond being just a feature, and become the product, within a sports brand?

It’s likely that whilst Manchester City are thinking about something longer-term, broader and holistic such as a Web3 fan club, they are still under pressure to deliver short-term engagements. After all, this is one of the most well-resourced teams in all of sports who have large strategy, innovation and Web3 teams compared to almost every other entity in sports. One would expect that the short tail lifecycle of drops like this is not the pinnacle, but only checkpoints along the journey to something bigger.

🧠Concluding Thoughts & Analysis

The Manchester City x Asahi collection seems well thought out from a design perspective, compared to many drops we’ve seen in the sports market. It feels like the art has been done properly, and not just auto-generated to minimise design costs to then maximise margins.

One question mark I have against it is using OpenSea as a partner. Although they are well-established in the industry, the platform is crypto-native and no longer guarantees secondary market royalties. Of course, OpenSea could have paid for the privilege of working with Manchester City and Asahi, either in actual cash or value in kind (tech and marketing support).

From Asahi’s perspective, I wonder if this was a pre-agreed inventory or something opportunistic. Manchester City sponsors know that being associated with a strong digitally mature brand in sport comes with the ‘halo effect’ of being seen to be innovative as a byproduct. So it wouldn’t surprise me if Web3 inventory was pre-agreed.

If I’m being constructive here — this is a small amount of revenue for Manchester City/Asahi, and OpenSea are a brand that does not have the UX/Infrastructure capable of onboarding sports fans into Web3 safely. So whilst the checkboxes that are ‘PR and headlines’ are ticked, the other side of it is that this is a sports team at the cutting edge doing an MVP drop that they will likely not return to in the future.

For balance, the wheel has to keep turning — and it’s difficult for people inside a sports organisation to balance those checkboxes in the short term, with building something they want to build in the long term, that will have a bigger, longer-term impact on how fans interact with their team.

Many stakeholders at sports brands are in the same position — trying to balance satisfying partners and sponsors, as well as managing upwards on things that matter most. In this case, it’s (likely) the battle between output (NFT drops, headlines and sponsor activation) and innovation (holistic Web3 fan club or longer-term play) which is never easy.

💡 Sporting Crypto Spotlight - Ep. 15 of the Podcast!

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More Sports & Web3 Stories

• Robinhood Forges Strategic Partnership with KLUTCH Sports Group (Read more here)

• NFT fantasy sports startup Sorare lays off 13% of staff as web3 gaming continues to sputter (Read more here)

• Sportian, by Globant, Agrees Global Strategic Partnership with StadioPlus (Read more here)

• OKX-Sponsored Majesticks GC to Play at First-ever LIV Golf Hong Kong Tournament (Read more here)

• Leading Saudi Sportstech Grintafy announces strategic investment from Chiliz (Read more here)

General ‘Stuff’ that Could Impact You

• SEC delays decision on BlackRock's spot Ethereum ETF proposal (Read more here)

• Coachella gives NFTs a second try after FTX integration debacle (Read more here)

• Thought NFTs were dead? A piece of pixelated art just sold for $16 million (Read more here)

• New Sony Patent for NFT, “Super-fungible Token” for Gaming (Read more here)

• Deutsche Boerse launches regulated spot platform for crypto assets (Read more here)

• Iconic MMORPG MapleStory moves to Web3 with Avalanche (Read more here)

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